The First Image

- Chapter 1 -

Chapter 1: The First Image

I was not born a Woman of Color.

If I had been, this would be a much shorter book.

You would nod, say “ah, yes, that makes sense,” and move on with your life. I would be categorized, summarized, and placed neatly into whatever mental shelf you reserve for people who make things you don’t fully understand but feel obligated to respect.

But no.

I became one.

Which is far less convenient—for both of us.

Before that, I was something far more common.

A self-taught artist.

Which is a polite way of saying:

no one told me I was doing it wrong, and therefore I assumed I wasn’t.

I lived online.

Not in the philosophical sense—please, I still showered—but in the practical sense that my work existed almost entirely on screens. I posted regularly. Not because I had something urgent to say, but because silence online feels like death.

If you do not post, you do not exist.

If you do not exist, you cannot become anything.

So I posted.

Flat colors. Digital brushes. Simulated textures that pretended to have history but were, in truth, born and completed in the same second. I could undo anything. Revise anything. Perfect anything.

It was, in theory, ideal.

It was also deeply unsatisfying.

There is something suspicious about perfection.

It behaves too well.

My apartment in Beijing was small enough that I had accidentally memorized every sound it made.

The refrigerator clicked like it was judging me.

The pipes sighed at night, as if disappointed.

Even the floor had opinions—particularly near the kitchen, where it creaked in a tone that suggested I had stepped there too often without achieving anything meaningful.

I respected the floor’s honesty.

My workspace sat near a window I rarely opened.

Not because I disliked fresh air—but because Beijing does not offer just fresh air. It offers air with personality. Air that arrives with history, ambition, and occasionally construction dust.

I preferred my own environment.

Controlled. Predictable. Slightly stale, but loyal.

On the day everything changed, I was doing what I always did.

Scrolling.

Not with purpose. Not with intention.

Scrolling is not an activity. It is a state of being.

You enter it the way you enter sleep—slowly, without noticing, and then suddenly you are there, moving through things that do not belong to you but feel like they might.

Food. Faces. Opinions. Movements.

A dog wearing sunglasses.

A man explaining something incorrectly with confidence.

I passed them all.

And then—

I didn’t.

My thumb stopped.

Which, if you are familiar with scrolling, is a dramatic event.

It is the equivalent of time pausing, or a train deciding mid-journey that it has seen something interesting and would like to take a moment.

He was not posing.

That was the first offense.

Everyone poses.

Even people who claim they are not posing are, in fact, posing very carefully to appear as though they are not posing. It is a refined skill.

But him—

No.

He stood in the frame like the frame had interrupted him.

Slightly off-center. Shoulders relaxed. Expression neutral in a way that suggested he had better things to think about.

It was, frankly, rude.

The light fell across him without hesitation.

And he did not reject it.

He held it.

Not reflected—held.

I frowned.

Not because I disliked it.

Because I did not understand it.

I zoomed in.

Then out.

Then in again.

Like I was trying to confirm that what I was seeing was not some kind of visual trick or clever editing designed to make me feel inferior.

It was not.

Which was worse.

There are moments in life when something appears before you and quietly dismantles your confidence.

Not aggressively.

Not loudly.

Just enough to say:

“You thought you understood this.

You do not.”

I took a screenshot.

Then another.

Then I saved the image.

Then, because I am who I am, I immediately opened it in my software.

Because if something confuses me—

I draw it.

This is not a hobby. It is a compulsion.

For a long time, I did not draw.

I only stared.

Which, in artistic terms, is called research.

There is a difference between seeing and studying.

Seeing is polite. It allows things to exist without interference.

Studying is invasive. It asks questions no one volunteered to answer.

I studied him.

The slope of the shoulder.

The weight distribution.

The way light behaved like it had found something it preferred.

I did not like that.

Light should be neutral.

Light should not have favorites.

I began with a sketch.

Loose. Casual. Almost disrespectful.

I expected my hand to behave as it always had—confident, obedient, slightly arrogant.

Instead—

It hesitated.

I stopped.

Looked at my hand.

As if it had betrayed me.

“Don’t be dramatic,” I said aloud.

Which is something I say often, and rarely follow.

I tried again.

Adjusted the angle.

Simplified the form.

Reduced complexity.

This usually works.

It did not.

The more I drew, the less accurate it became.

Which was unacceptable.

I do not tolerate regression.

I erased.

Started again.

Erased again.

At one point I zoomed in so far that the image became abstract—just shapes, tones, values.

“Good,” I thought. “Now it is manageable.”

It was not.

Time passed.

Or it didn’t.

I am not reliable when it comes to time.

Eventually, I leaned back.

Looked at what I had created.

And—

It was wrong.

Completely wrong.

But not useless.

This is important.

There are different kinds of wrong.

There is lazy wrong.

There is careless wrong.

There is uninformed wrong.

And then—

There is honest wrong.

This was honest.

Which meant it had potential.

Which meant it was dangerous.

I smiled.

Which, for me, is not always a sign of happiness.

Sometimes it means:

“This is going to become a problem.”

That night, I did not post.

Which was unusual.

Possibly alarming.

If anyone had been tracking my activity, they would have assumed I had either died or achieved enlightenment.

Neither was true.

I sat with the image.

With the sketch.

With the growing realization that something had shifted—not externally, not in a way anyone else could observe—but internally, where all inconvenient transformations begin.

I did not know his name.

I did not know where he was.

I did not know that this moment—this entirely unremarkable, easily dismissible moment—would become the foundation of everything that followed.

But I knew this:

The screen was no longer enough.

That thought did not arrive dramatically.

No music. No sudden clarity.

Just a quiet, persistent understanding:

“If this is real—

then this is not where it ends.”

I closed my laptop.

The room felt smaller.

Or perhaps I had finally noticed that it always had been.

The refrigerator clicked.

Paused.

Resumed.

Still judging me.

I stood and walked to the window.

Looked at it for a moment.

As if it had asked me a question.

Then I opened it.

The air entered immediately.

Uninvited. Unfiltered. Alive.

Carrying sound, heat, movement—things my work had been avoiding.

I did not close it.

Behind me, the unfinished sketch remained on the screen.

Incomplete.

Incorrect.

Necessary.

I did not know it then—

but that image would become the first fracture in a system I had built to keep my work controlled, predictable, and ultimately forgettable.

People would later try to explain what I was doing.

They would use words like:

Provocative.

Obsessive.

Uncomfortable.

Important.

Sometimes all in the same sentence.

They would also try to explain me.

Which is always a mistake.

But none of that existed yet.

No galleries.

No critics.

No accusations.

No title.

Only this:

A small apartment.

A stubborn refrigerator.

A window that had finally been opened.

And an image—

that refused to behave.

That is where it began.

And if you are still reading—

then, like me—

you have already made your first mistake.

You stopped scrolling.